Chris Mckay’s Renfield is a welcome addition to the ever-growing vampire genre with Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula as its beating heart. Dracula and his familiar Renfield enter the chaotic 21st-century New Orleans, a heady mess of mob politics and crime.
Dracula, played by Nicolas Cage, is an embodiment of what horror-comedy is supposed to be. His character is fun, spontaneous, and bone-chillingly evil. He bursts into bats, and sits at Renfield’s dining table in his overwhelmingly colourful apartment. Nicholas Hoult’s Renfield attacks him with a book and not just any book, but How to Defend Yourself Against a Narcissist. He holds it as an ineffective bible, a fun play on how Christian symbols and books are said to ward away evil. In Chris Mckay’s world, support groups and self-help books are the new Christianity. It is absurd and bizarre but also weirdly logical.
Fuzzy Renfield of the new world
McKay’s version of Renfield is the ideal candidate for this new world. As per the legend, Renfield meets Dracula as a young lawyer and ultimately abandons his family to become his servant. It is a toxic, co-dependent relationship and Renfield finds the vocabulary for it in a support group where people discuss their destructive partners, bosses and family members.
Hoult gives Renfield this distinctly out-of-place, deer-caught-in-the-headlights avatar. It’s an enjoyable trope –– there is nothing like feeling protective about the “world’s most prolific serial killer.” He wants to atone for his sins and as classic Hollywood comedies go, gives himself a makeover so the audience knows it’s for real. Instead of the charcoal gray wool suit, he now wears a fuzzy, horizontally striped orange-green sweater—a clear testament to the impact careful costume design can have.
Renfield gives the audience the gift of a good screenplay. It is filled to the brim with well-timed and clever dialogues. Combine that with competent actors who get their comic timing right –– and you have an audience that is left in splits.
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Ridiculous gore, Dracula’s hilarious mess
There are also some over-the-top action sequences that give the film some Bollywood colour and humour. An obvious crowd-pleaser is Hoult’s Renfield delivering blow after blow using a bloody-severed arm as a baseball bat. There is also a severed head dripping blood after being slammed onto a car window. The gore is ridiculous.
McKay uses the intrinsic part of the genre in abundance, taking it to ludicrous heights—thus ensuring it doesn’t feel excessive.
Awkwafina plays a headstrong and idealistic cop Rebecca Quincy, a cliché character who wants to avenge her dead father and save the city from its crime-ridden underbelly. Despite the two characters and films being radically different, Awkwafina’s portrayal of Quincy feels the same as Crazy Rich Asians’ (2018) Goh Peik Lin. The two definitely have different mandates, but that stems from the writing, not from Awkwafina’s acting chops.
Dracula’s immersion into current culture makes Renfield a hilarious mess. With a protection circle sourced via Wiccan Tumblr and cocaine, his lair is an abandoned church hospital. And Renfield tells him, “I love myself. I deserve happiness.” Who would’ve ever thought? The King of the undead, Vlad the impaler, and all his other names aside—in Mckay’s imagination, he isn’t a mythic monster who makes your blood curdle. He’s just a toxic gaslighter. Though, as some may argue: that’s scarier.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)